Large scale computer systems may be used to provide a number of different services. A service may be any software, hardware or software and hardware implemented function provided at one or more computers for consumption at another computer. Examples of services may include, but are not limited to, web page services, email services, database access services, secure portal services, authentication services, search services and network monitoring services. Any given service may be provided in such a way that a number of individual server computers simultaneously provide the service under a load balanced or other workload distribution arrangement, for example a cluster. Any given service may also be provided in such a way that a number of individual servers are configured for active provision of the service and a further number of individual servers are configured for fall-back (also known as contingency) provision of the service. The fall-back provision may be invoked, for example as part of a testing or proving process, if one or more of the active provision servers cease operation and/or if a demand for the service exceeds a threshold or a current service provision capacity of the active provision servers. Similarly, one or more active provision servers may be reassigned to fall-back provision if a demand for the service is smaller than a threshold or than a current service provision capacity of the active provision servers or if one of the active provision servers starts operation again. Additionally, at any time, a different combination of all available servers may be allocated to either the active or fall-back provision for any given service. Any such changes in the servers allocated to a service and any such changes in the active and fall-back status of servers for a service may be carried out manually by an operator or automatically by a computer management system. Thus it can be seen that between any two points in time, the individual servers providing a given service may change significantly.
This low-level, high-volume detail is often unnecessary to determine the business-level configuration of a service. In addition, the technical nature of the information is often inappropriate for business areas involved in service management activities. Business continuity needs drive physical infrastructure to be distributed across discrete physical locations, meaning that the information driving service management is not which infrastructural component or components is providing the service, but physically where those components are located. The roles of those locations may differ from service to service and change over time, preventing the role of an individual physical component from being inferred directly.
The present invention has been conceived in the light of drawbacks and limitations of conventional systems.